Balloon catheters have been employed to provide treatment to relatively inaccessible body cavities such as occluded blood vessels, nasal cavities, wounds, or paranasal sinuses and the like. In some cases, these balloons are used to introduce fluids onto the linings of various body cavities to carry medications such as antibiotics and the like into intimate contact with the interior surfaces of the cavities. Attempts to clean a cavity with a forceful jet into the cavity that is filled with fluid is defeated as its force is absorbed by the fluid. A device that reduces the volume of the cavity to a thin rim over the entire surface can force the flow directly onto the walls and in a direction that parallels the walls but without dissipation of the force and covering the entire surface. In essence this is the basic concept of this invention.
Certain of these balloons have been formed with walls of porous materials so that the fluids from the interior of the balloons will flow outwardly against the body cavity interior surfaces to provide medicated fluids or the like to those surfaces. U.S. Patent Publication 2007/0129751 assigned to Acclarent, Inc. discloses a device for balloon sinusplasty which may employ a balloon with porous walls to deliver fluids to the interior walls of sinus cavities. The fluid flows from the interior of the balloon are thus generally directed perpendicularly to the interior surfaces of the body cavity and are sometimes pressurized so that any medication contained in the fluid will forcefully impact the interior walls of the cavity. These fluid streams can only clean areas similar to the cross-sections of the streams and schemes for moving the streams over the side walls invariably leave some areas untouched or under cleaned. Increasing the force of the streams impacting the walls may do harm to the walls.
In many medical situations it is desirable to remove dead cells and the like which may have accumulated on the interior wall of a body cavity. For example, in a healthy nose mucus produced by the lining of the paranasal sinuses drains out of the sinus through the ostium, an opening connecting the interior of the sinus cavity to the nasal passages, carrying cellular and bacterial debris with it. In conditions such as sinusitis the mucus may be prevented from freely exiting the ostium and tends to accumulate the debris on the interior walls of the sinus cavities interfering with the normal functions and healing of the cavities. This mucosal congestion may result in microbial growth on the surface which must be removed to restore the sinuses to their normal function.